Yeoman

From Conservapedia

The Yeoman was the term for independent farmers in the U.S. in the late 18th and early 19th century. The yeoman have been intensely studied by specialists in American social history, and the history of Republicanism. The term fell out of common use after 1840 and is now used only by historians.

Yeomen in the South are often called Plain Folk of the Old South. They were the middling white Southerners of the 19th century who owned few slaves or none. They played a major role in the history of the Ante Bellum South, although they were less influential than the planters.

Historians have long debated the social, economic and political roles. Terms used by scholars include "common people", "yeomen" and "Crackers."

Historian Richard Hofstadter traced the yeoman ideal in America's sentimental attachment to the rural way of life, which is 'a kind of homage that Americans have paid to the fancied innocence of their origins. To call it a 'myth' is not to imply that the idea is simply false. Rather the 'myth' so effectively embodies people's values that it profoundly influences their ways of perceiving values and hence their behavior. He stresses the significance of the writings of Jefferson and his followers in the development of agricultural fundamentalism. Hofstadter emphasized the importance of the agrarian myth in American politics and life even after industrialization had revolutionized the American economy and life. Indeed American farmers into the 21st century identified themselves as yeomen with a superior claim to republican values., and looked down at the "corruption" they sensed in the nation's cities.[1]

South

From the travel accounts of Frederick Law Olmsted in the 1850s through the early-twentieth-century interpretations of historians William E. Dodd and Ulrich B. Phillips common southerners were portrayed as minor players in the antebellum period. Romantic portrayals, especially Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind (1937) and its 1939 film ignored them. Novelist Erskine Caldwell's Tobacco Road, portrayed the degraded condition of whites dwelling beyond the great plantations.

The major challenge to the negative view came from historian Frank Lawrence Owsley in Plain Folk of the Old South (1949). His book and followup studies ignited a long historiographical debate. Owsley started with the writings of Daniel R. Hundley who in 1860 had defined the southern middle class as "farmers, planters, traders, storekeepers, artisans, mechanics, a few manufacturers, a goodly number of country school teachers, and a host of half-fledged country lawyers, doctors, parsons, and the like." To find these people Owsley turned to the name-by-name files on the manuscript federal census. Owsley's Plain Folk of the Old South, says Vernon Burton, is, one of the most influential works on southern history ever written. Using their own newly invented codes they turned into data bases the manuscript federal census returns, tax and trial records, and local government documents and wills. Plain Folk argued that southern society was not dominated by planter aristocrats, but that yeoman farmers played a significant role in it. The religion, language, and culture of these common people created a democratic "plain folk" society. Critics say he overemphasized the size of the southern landholding middle class while excluding the large class of poor landless and slaveless white southerners.[2] Owsley assumed that shared economic interests united southern farmers without considering the vast difference inherent in the planters' commercial agriculture versus the yeomen's subsistence life style.

In his study of Edgefield County, South Carolina, Orville Vernon Burton[3] classified white society into the poor, the yeoman middle class, and the elite. A clear line demarcated the elite, but according to Burton, the line between poor and yeoman was never very distinct. Stephanie McCurry argues, yeomen were clearly distinguished from poor whites by their ownership of land (real property). Yeomen were "self-working farmers," distinct from the elite because they worked their land themselves alongside any slaves they owned. Ownership of large numbers of slaves made the work of planters completely managerial.

From yeoman to redneck

After the Civil War the status of the yeomen fell drastically. Many became sharecroppers or tenants--they worked land owned by landowners in town. In the towns the rising southern middle class rejected the celebration of rural life associated with the yeoman. They denounced as "demagogues" the radical leaders who appealed to the poor farmers, for example "Pitchfork Ben Tillman who was governor and senator from South Carolina. As the poor farmers endorsed lynching of uppity blacks, the middle class townsfolk denounced lynching in the name of Law and order. Some poor farmers moved to mill towns, especially to work in the textile mills of the Carolinas. The money was much better than on the hard-scrabble farms, but this again represented a fall in social status. By the end of the century the middle class was ridiculing the former yeomen as "rednecks" and "hillbillies."[4]

Self image of farmers

When Harry Truman's Secretary of Agriculture Charles Brannan in 1949 proposed a plan of direct assistance to small farmers, he justified it by reasserting the importance of the small family farmer as the foundation of American democracy. However in the Grange small farmers opposed the plan because it too closely resembled welfare and would undermine their self image as independent yeomen and successful entrepreneurs. Agribusiness used the same images to oppose it for its own reasons. Brannan sought to protect the small farmer against competition from the large companies, but the plan was not accepted by Congress because farmers self-image would not allow for welfare.[5]

notes

↑ "Redneck" refers to being sun-burned from worked in the hot fields. "Hillbillies" lived in remote mountain areas. Stephen A. West, From Yeoman to Redneck in the South Carolina Upcountry, 1850–1915. (2008)